The Ambiguity of Wit: William Wycherly's The Country Wife

Charles II reopened the theatres in 1660 and inaugurated the second golden age of the English stage.  Today's show looks at one of the bawdiest plays to come from the period, a "comedy of manners" whose clever use of language points to the reality of style over substance.

The Country Wife text: https://theater.lafayette.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/59/2021/03/The-Country-Wife.pdf

Transcript

London lives again! After years of Puritan gloom and theatrical silence, bawdy Britannia returns to the boards! With a swish of lace and the flourish of a royal quill, His Most Merry Majesty, King Charles the Second, has reopened the theatres — and none too soon!

The ink is dry on royal decree: the theatres are back in business, and London is ready to laugh, weep, and ogle again! The capital’s thespians are dusting off their doublets and warming up their soliloquies, while playwrights sharpen their wits — and their quills — for a fresh age of Restoration rapture.

That’s right!  It’s curtains up once more in the capital!  After nearly two decades of Cromwellian cheerlessness, the King has declared: “No more of that drab Puritan fare — no more boredom in breeches!  Bring back the greasepaint, the drama, and the debauchery!”

And what’s this? Ladies — actual ladies — upon the stage! Yes, you heard that correctly, chaps — real women, acting out women’s parts, winning hearts and raising eyebrows from Whitehall to Wapping! This season, the swooning is genuine, the décolletage daring, and the Puritans positively fuming! The age of boys in bonnets is officially over.  It’s not just your father’s Shakespeare anymore! 

So whether you crave a saucy comedy, a weepy tragedy, or a bit of bodice and a bedroom door that won’t stay shut, it’s curtain call in Covent Garden and revels in Drury Lane! Once again, the spotlight shines upon the English stage!

Thanks to good King Charles, Britannia is acting up once more, treading the boards with style, sass, and a scandalous wink. So powder those wigs, fetch the playbill, and join the revelry. Tally-ho for theatre — and long live the King!

On the 19th of July, 1660, not even two months after he landed at Dover and proceeded to London to reclaim the crown of England, Charles Stuart, second of his name, issued a draft Royal Warrant which granted Sir William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew the rights to stage plays with scenery and music, establish player companies, and build theatres.  The “merry monarch” was establishing a tone, reopening the theatres after 18 years.  Po-faced Puritans had closed them in 1642, concerned that people might enjoy “lascivious mirth,” and restricted all fun to asserting one’s moral superiority and occasionally whipping a Quaker through the streets.  But now, Charles II had declared “the show must go on” and formalized the restoration of English drama with Letters Patent under the Great Seal in 1662 for Killigrew and 1663 for Davenant, which specified “none other shall from henceforth act, or represent comedies, tragedies, plays or entertainments of the stage within our said cities of London, Westminster and the suburbs thereof.”  In doing so, Charles won the approbation of poet and playwright John Dryden, who chirrupped that His Majesty had awakened

the dull and heavy spirits of the English, from their natural reserv'dness; loosen'd them, from their stiff forms of conversation; and made them easy and plyant to each other in discourse. Thus, insensibly, our way of living become more free: and the fire of the English wit, which was before stifled under a constrain'd, melancholy way of breeding, began first to display its force: by mixing the solidity of our Nation, with the air and gayety of our neighbors.

Hello and welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast where, today, you have front row seats to the beginning of modern English theatre.  During the civil wars and the interregnum, playgoing had been banned by Parliament, and thus ended that first flowering of English drama headed by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and their followers.  But when the king opened the box office again, it was clear that the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage had been transformed.  Perhaps most obviously, women were permitted onstage – the first actresses trod the boards.  Open air theatres like the Globe were replaced by indoor proscenium arches, which allowed evening performances, as well as elaborate staging, scenery, and special effects.  Stylistically, the spectacle dominated – artificiality was privileged.  The audiences became less diverse – no groundlings now – the upper-classes exclusively attended.  The patents granted to Davenant and Killigrew ensured that those audiences would only experience plays with a pro-Royalist agenda and that the most powerful form of popular entertainment would be firmly in control of the crown.  

We now call this second golden age of the English stage Restoration drama and depending on whom you ask, the dates run from 1660 to 1700, or 1710, or 1716 – whatever.  We needn’t be concerned about the end date.  We should note the absolute explosion of theatrical activity at this time, though – an explosion whose aftershocks we still feel today.  Professor J. Douglas Canfield – the greatest scholar whose works are within reach of my armchair – painstakingly discerns no less than nine subgenres of Restoration drama, the listing of which reminds one of Polonius: heroic romance, political tragedy, personal tragedy, tragicomic romance, social comedy, subversive comedy, corrective satire, menippean satire, and laughing comedy.  My lord!  One can certainly presume some microscopic hairsplitting there; I refer you to recent episodes for my thoughts on such generic punctiliousness.  Nonetheless, one does get the sense of the Restoration theatre as a horn of plenty, a superabundance of wit, satire, and intrigue.  We’ll look at a few plays from this period over the coming episodes.

Today, however, I want to look at a play by William Wycherly called The Country Wife.  It is notoriously scandalous and bawdy and, to my mind, is a great introduction to Restoration comedy writ large.  And it really is the comedies that have had a lasting influence – the tragedies have been largely forgotten by all but academics.  They are hardly, if ever, staged anymore because, I think, the tragedies of the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers are just so much better.  On the other hand, the Restoration writers are much funnier.  Sorry, but while I would happily bear William Shakespeare’s children, I just don’t think the comedies are all that funny.  There are a few good lines and scenes – Dogberry in Much Ado is pretty great – but Shakespeare and Co. really leaned into feeble puns, tiresome malapropisms, and cross-dressing, and the way they did so just doesn’t really translate anymore.  I’m pretty sure that people only laugh at Shakespeare’s comedies when they’re staged because they want to show others in the audience that they know that line was supposed to be funny, not because they actually thought it was funny.

Anyway, the Restoration guys liked a good pun and thought it a hoot to stick a woman in a man’s jacket, too, but somehow, they’re funnier about it.  They seem somehow more modern – the jokes still come across as jokes, not as relics of a lost humor.  They are Oscar Wilde two centuries early.  You can still see their influence on modern British comedians like John Cleese, Rowan Atkinson, Jennifer Saunders, Ben Elton, Stephen Fry, Catherine Tate, and scores more.  The witty wordplay as deployed by writers like William Wycherly and his contemporaries in comedies simultaneously dry and farcical set the template for what many – well, Americans, mostly – call “that British humor.”

But I don’t want to give the impression that somehow Restoration comedy was a “year zero” phenomenon, utterly dispensing with all that had gone before and starting again.  Much was changed, that is true, but there are through-lines.  For instance, a style that would be called “the comedy of manners” developed during this period that bears many of the hallmarks of Jacobean city comedies like Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist or Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, both of which have been covered in previous episodes.  Ultimately, of course, the comedy of manners derives from classical sources, but it came to embody in Restoration England humorous plays which focused on the upper classes (as opposed to the more middle class subjects of the antecedent city comedies) and their obsession with appearances, social status, and etiquette.  These are, of course, revealed to be absurd pretensions parodied using witty repartee, wordplay, and intricate plotting.  Another dominant feature of the subgenre is the stock character – again much like the city comedies and comedies of humors from before the civil wars.  One is likely to meet the fop (a man overly concerned with his appearance), the false wit, the true wit, the rake (a libertine womanizer), the clever servant, the bumpkin, the hypocrite, the jealous husband, etc. etc. etc.

Wycherly’s The Country Wife is an excellent example of the type.  It was probably first performed on January 12, 1675 at Drury Lane’s Theater Royal – the playhouse established by Thomas Killigrew with that patent from the king.  Wycherly was himself an aspiring courtier and the heir to a Shropshire fortune – did a bit of soldiering when the mood was on him.  Charles II seemed quite fond of him and the court ladies, too.  The play occupies that strange place in criticism whereby it was at once celebrated for its dazzling wit and excoriated for its licentiousness.  The latter did it in for a while.  It disappeared from the stage in the mid-1700s, reappearing a few years later in wildly bowdlerized versions, which, predictably, lay limp as a dead mackerel.  Not until 1924 – 1924 dear listener! – did The Country Wife return to the English stage.  What could be so scandalous as to be proscribed for 175 years?  It’s time for the quick and dirty.  And this time, emphasis on the dirty. . . .   

Meet the tellingly-named Harry Horner, a witty London rake who hatches a wild and outrageous scheme: he spreads a rumor that he’s become impotent – well, a eunuch, actually – from a botched treatment for venereal disease. Why? Because he wants husbands to trust him alone with their wives. Of course, Horner is very potent indeed. Priapically so: he intends to seduce as many married women as possible.  Certainly no one would suspect a eunuch.

Enter Sir Jasper Fidget, a status-obsessed and gullible husband who believes Horner’s lie completely. He actually encourages his own wife, Lady Fidget, to spend time with Horner, thinking him the perfect, "safe" companion for fashionable ladies. What Sir Jasper doesn’t realize is that Lady Fidget is no better than she should be.  Oooh!

Lady Fidget quickly becomes one of Horner’s lovers, along with Mrs. Squeamish—a young woman who feigns modesty and shock at scandalous talk but is more than eager to get in on the action. These women cloak their affairs in a kind of performative virtue, even convincing themselves they’re doing Horner a favor. In one hilarious scene, they argue that their visits to him are acts of charity—comforting a poor, impotent man. The soul of Christian compassion.

Meanwhile, Mr. Pinchwife, a jealous, controlling older man, has married a young country girl, Margery, believing her rural innocence will keep her faithful. Margery, bored and curious, sets her sights on Horner. Despite her husband’s increasingly desperate attempts to lock her away – including that absolutely foolproof chestnut of a scheme: dressing her as a man – she finds ways to experience London life—and discovers she’s far more independent and clever than anyone expected.

While all this whirls about, Horner’s friend Harcourt falls in love with Alithea, Pinchwife’s intelligent and virtuous sister. Alithea is engaged to Sparkish, a ridiculous, self-important fop, but Harcourt tries to win her over with a mixture of genuine feeling, sharp wit, and dressing like a minister.  Takes all kinds.

The final act is pure farce: mistaken identities, whispered seductions, desperate cover-ups, people hiding behind furniture, and puns – oh, so many puns. Horner somehow escapes exposure, the hypocrites maintain their spotless reputations, and nearly every character walks away believing their dignity is intact.  Wycherley skewers the double standards of his age—particularly the way women’s virtue and men’s honor are publicly performed and privately ignored.

So whether it’s Margery’s innocence, Lady Fidget’s “honor,” Squeamish’s fake modesty, or Sir Jasper’s clueless approval of his wife’s affair, everyone in this world is either lying to others, to themselves, or both.

And Horner? He just keeps grinning behind his mask, seducing his way through London’s polite society—with their full permission.

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As I said earlier, you can see a lot of influence from the pre-Civil War comedies.  The outlandish deception at the heart of the plot being most obvious, along with the liberal use of charactonyms – a name given to a fictional character that suggests a distinctive trait or characteristic of that character.  Harry Horner indicates his sexual rapaciousness; Squeamish is clearly ironic; Quack, the doctor, merely on the nose.  Pinchwife suggests his jealous and tyrannical control over his wife; Fidget, especially as pertains to the lady – well, a bit bawdy, yeah?  And, of course, some of the names indicate the stock nature of some characters, such as Sparkish, who is the false wit – not really a bright spark, just sort of spark-ish.  You get the point.  Other stock characters?  Well, Horner is the rake, Lucy the clever servant, and Margery the bumpkin.

And speaking of Margery, she is, of course, the country wife of the play’s title.  And that may seem odd, given that she’s not really the protagonist.  Even in an ensemble setting, she occupies less stage time than one might expect given her eponymous role.  Well, listener, the title is a rather naughty pun and you may need to cover the young ones’ ears; I want to maintain a clean rating on all the finest podcatchers.  The adjective “country” – its first syllable puns on a vulgar name for female genitalia (it’s the same pun Hamlet fires at Ophelia before the play-within-a-play).  The second syllable – “try” – means, well, to attempt, obviously, but also to test or to sample.  And all this modifies the noun “wife.”  I think you see my meaning.  

All this stuff we’ve seen before, though.  What’s different about Wycherly’s use of these devices – and about Restoration comedy broadly speaking – is that there is little to no sense of moral judgment on the part of the author.  The text itself seems to take no ethical stance on the values or behavior of its characters.  The satires from early in the century at least made it clear that, charming or entertaining as we might find them, we should abjure the actions of the con men and deceivers therein.  We could detect some normative moral center in the comedies of the humors or of the city – maybe not always easily, but we knew what those villains were doing was bad.

But in The Country Wife, well, seems everybody wins.  Well, maybe Sparkish loses out – he doesn’t get Alithea’s wealth.  But otherwise, things carry on as they have always done.  Horner sleeps with all the women he wants, and all the women who want to sleep with him, Pinchwife stays married to the vibrant Margery, Margery gets a more exciting life, Harcourt marries Alithea.  No one suffers for their jealousy, hypocrisy, or infidelity.  Indeed, in this sex comedy, even venereal disease is treated as such a remote consequence that it would inspire incredulous gossip.

Then what’s the point of the play?  What’s its theme?  What’s it saying about life and society, man?  Good questions.  Critic Helen Burke points out its "notorious resistance to interpretation." Is it a satire?  Well, that implies a moral standard against which the characters fail to measure up, but the play doesn’t indicate one.  Is it simply a romantic comedy or a bedroom farce?  Maybe, but the play seems too clever and complex to be merely a fanciful distraction. Horner can be dismissed as a shallow rake, but what should we make of his vocal misogyny and sinister predation?  Not to mention obvious charm? Another scholar, Laura Brown, says this interpretative Gordian knot is itself the intention of the play: "Wycherley maintains a complete disjunction between social and moral judgment." 

OK, now that’s something we can maybe hang our hat on – or our heroically huge Restoration wig.  I like Brown’s comment because it succinctly points to the central cleavage of the play (didn’t mean that pun, but I’ll take the happy accident).  Social judgment – the delineations drawn by social convention and expectation – is not grounded in any transcendent moral order.  These are separate, compartmentalized systems.  In the play’s very first scene, Horner definitively states this:

Women of Honour, as you  call'em, are only chary of their reputations, not their Persons, and 'tis scandal they wou'd avoid, not Men.

While we must reckon Horner’s literal meaning through his rather chauvinistic attitude toward women, the general postulate stands: the anxiety is about social judgment, not moral turpitude.  I suppose one could reduce this to the old junior high English class chestnut “appearance v. reality,” but I think Wycherly is up to more than that.  I think what’s being asserted here is not just the tension or bifurcation between these two, but rather the utter irrelevance – indeed, for all practical purposes – the nonexistence of, well, reality.

I think I risk perverting Kantian perception here, his distinction between the thing as perceived and the thing in itself.  What I really mean to say is that in the world of the play, appearance is reality.  One is what one appears to be, and any appeal – in this case, to a standard of moral rectitude – is immaterial to the “moral” (in scare quotes) evaluations given by society.  

Let me point out some elements of Wycherly’s style to elaborate my point.  A reader will notice a couple of things right away: 1) Wycherly writes in prose; gone is the blank verse that was so the calling card of English drama, but what may be considered a more naturalistic mode of speech immediately reveals itself as perhaps even more artificial, because (and this is a second feature) Wycherly liberally employs in the characters’ speech what we could call an aphoristic style.  Not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but an aphorism is a neatly-turned, self-contained phrase that purports to reveal some great wisdom or truth.  Like a proverb or, less subtly, a slogan.  You know the sort of thing: “early bird gets the worm,” “minds are like parachutes: they only function when open.”  Many of the characters speak in such a manner.  Horner asserts that “affectation is [Nature’s] greatest monster” and “wine gives you liberty, love takes it away.”  Pinchwife opines that “Cuckolds and Bastards, are generally makers of their own fortune.”  One of my favorites is the quip by the servant Lucy: “married women shew all their Modesty the first day, because married men shew all their love the first day.”  The thing about aphorisms, especially such cynical ones, is that they are free-floating observations, relying only upon their self-referential structure for authority.  They don’t have to be true in any constative or empirical sense.  They function as truth because they seem to be true.  Their very manifestation is evidence of their worth.

One is also struck by the predominance of punning in The Country Wife.  Many of these, obviously, are rather juvenile wordplay for sexual organs or sexual acts.  There are some more complex ones, however, such as when Horner laments “I shall make no more cuckolds, sir” and Sir Jasper laughingly replies, “Mercury, mercury!”  What an odd response, one might think.  But Sir Jasper invokes the Roman god Mercury, who is associated with wit.  Worth noting that the god’s winged hat resembles a pair of cuckold’s horns.  Furthermore, mercury was a common treatment for venereal disease.  

The cuckold’s horns, by the by, are something of a running joke in the play.  Can’t escape them.  Even the names of inns, noticed by Margery as she wonders at London’s bustle, make reference to the horn-headed dupe: the Bull’s Head, the Ram’s Head, the Stag’s Head.

Anyway, punning, while arguably the lowest form of wit, also reveals the essential artificiality of language.  A pun exploits a word’s multiple meanings and the extent that two people can successfully communicate with each depends entirely on both agreeing on a particular meaning.  So what a word actually refers to in the “real world” almost becomes less important than what the conversants intend or accept it to mean.  Here’s an example: when Lady Fidget, in faux modesty asks Horner: “How, you saucy fellow, would you wrong my honor?”, he replies, “If I could.”

OK, what’s going on here?  Well, the direct meaning of Lady Fidget’s question is “do you doubt or would you have others doubt that I am an honorable woman?”  Honor here is a reputation for purity or fidelity.  Horner’s riposte plays with the various interpretations suggested both by the word “honor” and the intent of the question.  Horner takes “honor” to mean her . . . availability for sex.  As a married woman, she is not available to Horner, but he would have sex with her if he could.  We’ve also a play here on his putative impotence.  His response also implies that her question could be understood not as the outraged query of an insulted woman, but rather as a suggestion, an offer for him to have sex with her: would you like to have sex with me?  She can’t sort out his intentions, so she asks directly: “How d’ye mean, sir?”  He pirouettes again and she storms off in a pretended huff: is she shocked at his impudence or disappointed at his inability to perform?  Write your answer on a $20 bill and send it to me here.

Another technique Wycherly employs, closely connected to punning, is repetition.  A handful of words keep coming up in the play: honor, obviously, but also discover, know, toad, and orange.  Let’s start with “toad,” shall we?  The word occurs seven times, far above the average for a sex comedy, wouldn’t you think?  It’s always used as a term of abuse and always directed at Horner – the horny toad.  Ahem.  The 17th century, as it turns out, hoarded a wealth of associations for the little wart-hopper.  Listeners will know of their association with witchcraft and evil – probably the most famous toad line in all of literature comes from Macbeth and that hideous witches’ brew made from a toad that’s been sweating his venom for 31 days under a cold stone.  Oh, and one of the witches has a familiar toad called Paddock.  So there’s the idea of poison, corruption, and disease.  They’re also associated with transformation and rebirth.  Horner certainly claims to be a transformed man.  Almost paradoxically, toads were also associated with healing and relief.  They supposedly contained, inside their heads, a stone that could ward off the evils of the body.  And finally, toads are associated with fertility.  

Now, oranges were a new thing to me.  Well, as used in The Country Wife, anyway.  I enjoy me an orange as much as the next guy, and have been scurvy-free for all my 54 years.  In early modern Europe, oranges were a luxury item, and signified wealth, abundance, and prosperity.  In one scene, Margery (in her cunning disguise as her own brother) comes gleefully through the London crowd laden with oranges given her by Horner.  While Pinchwife grumbles at Horner’s cheek, the rake protests: “I have only given your little Brother an Orange, Sir.”  The jealous husband, in one the play’s approximately 4,723 breaking-the-fourth-wall asides, gasps: “You have only squeez'd my Orange, I suppose, and given it me again!”  At first I thought this was one of those things where, if you say a word in a suggestively rude tone, it instantly becomes a dirty joke.  There’s nothing particularly arousing about citrus fruit, but if you say “squeeze” with an implied wink and a nudge, well, ho-ho!  Ribaldry.  But there are also a couple of references in the play to “orange wenches” – which were young women in the theater pit who sold oranges and other snacks to the audience.  They might also act as go-betweens, passing messages and so forth.  The implication is that you could perhaps squeeze their oranges, too, if you thought the juice was worth it.  See?  I made one of those jokes.

Actually, another of those fabricated jokes drives the infamous “china scene” in Act IV – one especially targeted for expurgation in the 18th century – in which Horner has the ladies in his lodging and shows them his china – the crockery, not the country – which euphemizes the sex they presumably have in the back room.  There are plenty of racy puns about the rake “coming into [her] the back way.”  Oh, my!  Lady Fidget, evidently satisfied upon her return, says, “we women of quality never think we have enough china.”  Horner assures the assembled that, while he cannot supply them all with china, he “will have a roll-wagon” for them next time.  A roll-wagon is a cylindrically shaped Chinese vase, and I don’t think you need to be Freud to catch his drift.  Sometimes a vase is not a vase.

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The Country Wife, while literally set in London, simultaneously takes place in a socially-imagined version of that city.  Much importance is assigned to the distinctions between the capital-c Country – the rural world connoting purity and innocence; the Town, the center of urban fashion and style; and the City, London’s mercantile hub, and the haunt of the petit bourgeois who wish to become part of Town society.  Mr. Pinchwife says that he “know[s] the Town” – that he is savvy to the mores of the swanky world.  There is the hint of the outsider penetrating an inner circle, taking mastery of something outside his usual environment – though, of course, this is all ironic.  That, along with several deployments of the verb “to know” in the Biblical sense, sets the idea of knowledge or understanding itself as somehow slippery or ambiguous.

Which leads to the final word that stuck out to me for its ubiquity and ambiguity: discover.  The modern sense of the word – to be the first to obtain knowledge about something – has existed since the 1550s, and so Wycherly and his characters would have known that use.  But in the play, the word – used 12 times –  almost exclusively represents its older meaning: to reveal, expose, or betray.  Pinchwife frets unceasingly when Margery-in-drag flirts with Horner: “O there 'tis out, he has discovered her” and “S'death, she will discover her self yet in spite of me.”  

What all this adds up to, for me, is a sense that, in The Country Wife, anything can mean anything.  If I was to get fancy-linguistic a la Ferdinand de Saussure, I could say that the language of the play is made up of free-floating signifiers, that words can be easily detached from any real-world referents and made to stand in for any intention the speaker wishes.  By such detachment, the characters create and participate in a social world whose judgments cannot be grounded in any moral conventions outside itself.  It’s just as Laura Brown implies, society and morality seem to be a Venn diagram with no overlap between the circles.

Now I don’t really think Wycherly is consciously engaging in some poststructuralist, deconstructive analysis a la Derrida and Foucault.  His project is more modest, I think – though that seems a strange word to describe one of the bawdiest plays in the English canon.  He’s writing a witty, risque play mocking the upper classes, of which he is a member, and selling it to members of that class, the only ones who can afford the indoor-theatre prices of the Restoration.  J. Douglas Canfield – he of the nine subgenres – classifies The Country Wife as “subversive comedy” that “disrupted the very status hierarchy being reaffirmed.”  Well, I buy the reaffirmation part – not sure how disruptive it is.  Jonathan Swift once said, “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.” It seems to me to lack the normative moral center that satire requires – I don’t really feel like we are asked to sit in judgment of the characters and their reckless, selfish behavior.  The characterization of Pinchwife may be a swipe at Puritanism, but it doesn’t seem particularly biting.  Just foolish.

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I hope you enjoyed our little outing to the theatre today.  We’ll drop in for a few more shows in future episodes.  Bring some money for the oranges.  Please follow, like, subscribe, and review the Classic English Literature Podcast – all that kind of stuff raises the show’s profile on Apple and Spotify and Amazon and all the other podcatchers.  Hit "Support the Show” or “Buy Me a Coffee” if you’d like to help me out with the expenses of putting the show on.  Thanks for listening, supporting, and encouraging.   Enjoy the next couple of weeks, and we’ll talk soon.